Principal Active Defense Engineer (Cybersecurity)

Location: Reston, Virginia, USA; hybrid work with at least 50% of each quarter spent in the office or in the field

Annual base salary: $167,200–$300,000 USD for additional US locations; compensation may also include a bonus and stock grants.

Company

hirify.global is a Fortune 500 company and AI platform for managing people, money, and agents.

What you will do

• Set architecture, detection methodology, and design standards for the active defense detection portfolio and platform.
• Lead complex initiatives from concept through production, including validation, documentation, and incident response playbooks.
• Build reusable detections-as-code, CI/CD, validation tooling, and curated data capabilities.
• Drive detection coverage, fidelity, and noise reduction for incident response alerts.
• Guide the use of AI agents, automation, and generative tools in detection authoring, validation, and tuning.
• Mentor engineers and partner with incident response, threat intelligence, audit, security tooling, and platform teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software, platform, or security engineering experience, including production-scale detection or security capabilities.
• Experience setting technical direction and leading complex multi-system initiatives as an individual contributor.
• Strong software development skills in Python, Java, Kotlin, Scala, JavaScript, or another general-purpose language.
• Experience architecting a detections-as-code pipeline, detection platform, or production data pipeline.
• Experience applying generative AI, conversational AI, or AI agents to security engineering and evaluating when not to use them.
• Experience with Splunk, public cloud environments, automated testing, threat-informed detection, behavioral analytics, and cross-team technical leadership.

Nice to have

• Experience with MITRE ATT&CK, anomaly detection, risk-based alerting, or entity-level context.
• SANS or CISSP certifications or related security training.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible work combines in-person collaboration with remote work.
• Opportunities to attend industry conferences and training sessions.
• Comprehensive benefits and professional development support.
• Potential eligibility for the hirify.global Bonus Plan, role-specific bonuses, and annual refresh stock grants.
• Reasonable accommodations are available throughout the application and employment process.